Solid-State drives may be gaining in performance, but standard hard drives are still pushing forwards in terms of how much data they can store. This week Western Digital has pushed the storage barrier up by managing to squeeze 1TB into a 2.5″ hard drive.

The WD Scorpio Blue comes in both 750GB and 1TB models with the latter squeezing 333GB per platter while maintaining a 3GB/s transfer speed through the SATA interface. Both drives spin at 5,200rpm, have an 8MB cache, and a latency of 5.5ms. Western Digital is using the new drives in a range of products as both an internal and external hard drive.

We can expect to see the Scorpio Blue being offered in laptops, nettops, and other small form-factor PCs, but Western Digital are also going to use them for portable hard drives. Two new models of the Western Digital My Passport Essential SE range have been announced using the Scorpio Blue drives, so that’s 750GB or 1TB in a 15 x 80 x 126mm package and powered over USB. Both new drives are available from the Western Digital online shop costing $199.99 (750GB) and $299.99 (1TB).

Both new drives are shipped with WhisperDrive, ShockGuard, and SecurePark, offering users a very quiet, shock tolerant, and reliable hard drive regardless of what form you use it in.

I doubt it will take long for these drives to start appearing in laptops and it gives those with small form-factor media centers another storage upgrade option without having to add an external drive. If you can fit two of these drives inside one of those small cases you should be set for a while.

Having 1TB of storage in your pocket sounds a little unreal to me even though it was inevitable, but I bet in 5 years time it will be a distant memory and we’ll be talking about tens or hundreds of terabytes in a mobile form. Such is the lightning fast progress of hard drive technology I doubt the high prices attached to these drives will survive very long.

Another positive about these two new drives is the price impact it will have on 160, 250, 320, 400, and 500GB 2.5″ drives. Expect them to fall soon.

Reader Comments

jqp

Yes, I think they’re on to an up and coming trend. With the increased emphasis on size and efficiency, 3.5 drives could become an endangered species. SATA plays a role here as well — the 2.5 form factor can now make use of the same standard connectors as 3.5 with no adapters required.

I run an energy efficient, small form factor server with dual 2.5 drives in a RAID 1 configuration.